Several of these works are connected to photography only by the thinnest of threads, yet a single strand is sometimes enough to substantially affect a picture’s meaning. Schwitters, Hoch, and Conner, for example, used fragments of actual photographs within their collage works to subvert linear perspective and to create new modes of meaning through the surreal combination of seemingly random elements. Johns, Kiefer, and Twombly incorporated photographs within their drawings and paintings to link the works to the “real world” in a way that could not be achieved purely by the hand.

Duchamp proposed another highly influential strategy; that a “found” object or photograph can be transformed by nothing more than a calculated shift of context. This method has been adopted and modified by Marclay, On Kawara, and Gilbert & George who, utilizing un-altered record covers or postcards, have absorbed entire photographic objects in the service of their art. Both Warhol and Richter understood that photographic description itself could be ripe for dissection, and approached photography as original source and primary subject.

While making no attempt to be comprehensive, the twenty-nine exemplary works in NOT EXACTLY PHOTOGRAPHS explore a key aspect of photography’s peculiar and singular conduit to reality.